One Kid's Trash Read online

  Vij bumps my shoulder with his. “You ready to make history, man?”

  “Ummm.” It’s not like I had dreams of being cool. Mom always talks about the importance of setting “attainable goals.” Coolness is not an attainable goal for me. And I’ve come to terms with it. But this is the opposite of that. Joining the newspaper staff would be like pinning a bullseye on my back and then passing out flyers advertising free target practice. Suddenly, I am much less comfortable at this table.

  “Here it is!” Emilia yells, holding up her phone and rescuing me from Vij’s stare. I could hug her, except she looks like the kind that can and will throw a punch.

  “Let me see,” Jack or Gray says.

  Emilia passes over her phone. The twins say “uhhh?” together at the exact same time. “Give it, Jack,” Vij says, and takes it from the twin with the scar over his eyebrow. I make a mental note.

  “Ummm, no offense, Em, but what am I looking at here?” he asks.

  Emilia comes around the table to stand behind us.

  “That’s a picture of the parking lot!” she informs us.

  “Well, yes. And?” Emilia grabs the phone from him and swipes left, hard.

  “And… this is the same red Volvo in the handicapped spot without proper licensure,” she adds, holding it up an inch from his face.

  She watches us and waits. For what, I have no idea. When we just sit there, she yanks her ponytail tighter and sighs like my mom.

  “That’s illegal,” she explains.

  I know it’s a huge mistake before it happens, but everyone knows you can’t stop an eye roll midroll. When she catches me, her glare could melt bones.

  “What a lovely addition to our table,” she quips. “Thanks a lot, Vij.”

  * * *

  So, if we’re rating things on a first-day scale, similar to the pain scale at the doctor’s office, one being “I am now king of the school” and ten being “I have to change my name and relocate ASAP,” English and Spanish were solid fours—not terrible, mostly tolerable. Algebra is teetering on a seven with the specter of Mr. Wahl looming for the next nine months. Lunch would have been a three (I ate with other humans who did not try to see if I fit in the trash can), except for the newspaper invite, which will get me thrown in a trash can, so I’m sitting at a solid seven. Emilia would probably say eleven.

  But none of that matters, because I am about to enter the most painful part of all: physical education. Gym is the foundation on which the house of bullying was built. Hey kid, you’re about eye-level with everyone else’s elbow, right? Let’s shoot some hoops. Your legs are half the size of everyone else’s? Go line up. It’s relay races. Tug-of-war? We’ll put you in the middle where you can dangle like dead weight. Not even enough dead weight to count.

  The locker room reeks of sweat and farts and floor varnish. I find my name along the row. Vij’s locker is on the other side of the room, so I’m standing by myself, trying to shove my sweatshirt on top of my jeans and close the door before everything falls out again, when a hand snakes out and slams it shut. I yank my fingers away just in time.

  “Need a little help there, bro?”

  A giant has found its way into the locker room.

  A huge kid with the beginnings of facial hair smirks at me. His breath smells of pizza and Dr Pepper. I recognize him from math class. His name is Chance Sullivan, and he’s on the basketball team. How could you name your kid “Chance” and ever expect him to be taken seriously?

  He looms, serious enough. I start to swallow convulsively. There’s not enough air in the room or spit in my mouth.

  “How’d a third grader get in here?” he asks the room at large, and laughs. It is the noise of a frog burping. It’s as dumb an insult as it sounds, and I have heard so much worse. Huge-O. Tiny Tot. Lowrider. Smurfette. Bite-Size. Runt. Hobbit. Oompa Loompa. Arm Rest was the worst because it invited physical contact. As bullies go, Chance is an amateur. For a second his words just hang there, and I pray it’ll come to nothing. Then one kid who’s sitting on the bench and tying his shoes chuckles. That’s all it takes, one laugh, to make it legit. I want to crawl into my locker and hide under my sweatshirt.

  “Whatever,” I mumble.

  “What’s that?” Chance leans down and I shrink back, which is a mistake. Never retreat.

  “Don’t worry about it, bud.” Chance pats me not-so-kindly on the shoulder. “You still got a few years for that voice to drop.” His own voice is the rumble of a motor, a pack-a-day man, a superhero. I will not cry. I just hope I don’t run. In the general allotment of “fight or flight,” I only got flight.

  Vij comes to my rescue. I am both thankful and irritated.

  “Let’s go,” he says without looking at Chance.

  “Vijay, my man. I was just introducing myself to your cousin.” Chance is jolly now, like we’re old pals. Of course he knows we’re cousins. It’s a small school. Everybody probably already knows my pants size too. Vij and I say nothing. Chance turns to go. I think it’s over. Then he reaches out his sweaty hand and rubs my head. “For luck,” he says. “Leprechauns are lucky, right?” So original. Call the tiny Irish kid a leprechaun.

  I imagine myself saying something, fighting back: Better a leprechaun than a troll or At least I remembered deodorant. It could be the beginning of a new era. Hugo O’Connell saves himself and saves the day. No more “small” talk. I’d be funny and popular and living my best life. Finally one of the cool kids. But in the end, I just stand there, humiliation fizzing in my chest while everyone else files out. Vij puts his hand on my shoulder. I shake it off.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says when we’re alone. “It’s just ’cause you’re new.”

  But we both know that’s a lie.

  Chapter Two Fortune Favors the Bold

  When I get home from school, the house smells like fried okra, which is another notch up the weirdness scale, because if our house ever smelled like anything back in Denver, it was takeout pizza or maybe burritos if Mom stopped by La Paz on her way home from work. My heart sinks. After a whole day of newness, I thought at least dinner would be normal.

  I walk down the hall. It’s white and bare and narrow. We haven’t hung any pictures yet. But the tiny kitchen is an explosion of color, like it was helicoptered in from a rain forest in Brazil. The walls are white, but you can only tell in the evening when the sun can’t shine through the green and red and yellow panes of the bay window. The colors shift constantly, like you’re inside a kaleidoscope. The window looks out over the backyard we share with the people who rent the other half of our duplex, a couple who run the Italian place next to St. Stephen’s Catholic Church.

  Mom pokes her head out from behind a cabinet door. A square of yellow light flickers across her face, turning her blue eyes green. It’s only four thirty, but her feet are already in the purple rabbit slippers I got her for Mother’s Day. They were supposed to be a joke. I miss getting home first and knocking out an hour of solid TV watching before hearing the click of her heels down the hallway.

  “Oh good. You’re home! Do you remember where we put the big colander?”

  “Ummm, what’s a colander?” I dump my backpack on the floor, the only surface not covered in okra.

  She shuts the cabinet and puts her thumbs to her temples, like it is all just too much.

  “The colander. Come on, Hugo. The big metal thing with holes in it.”

  I spin in one slow circle. “Sorry, Mom, just not seeing it.”

  She sighs and lets her hands fall, then pulls a stack of cookbooks off a chair. “Sit. How was your day?”

  She leans in too close.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re trying to read my brain waves.”

  “I’m not!”

  She removes a baking sheet from another chair and pulls it up, too close again. Our knees touch. She’s doing her therapist thing on me—studying my face, my posture; gazing deeply into my
eyes so it becomes a staring contest. I lose every time.

  “My day was as good as can be expected for a first day of middle school.” Her mouth turns down at the ends. She has flour on her nose. I remember her note in my pocket and feel a flash of guilt. It’s not her fault we’re here. That prize goes to Dad. I add, “I have three classes with Vij,” because more information, even the nonessential kind, is better than telling her about gym. Third grade. Leprechaun. My throat burns all over again. She can never, ever know that Chance exists. She worries enough as it is. I point to the cookbooks and the counters covered in pans and flour and what appears to be a small mountain of cornmeal near the toaster oven. “And how was your day?”

  She sits back and looks around like she’s just now clocked the mess. “I was trying to make your Grandma Sue’s okra. I thought it would help.” Help what? I want to ask. But Mom believes in total honesty, so I don’t ask. I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. Mom’s from Texas, but Colorado had mostly erased her Southern-ness. It only comes out when she’s stressed. She smiles, but it looks like a struggle, which is the only reason I don’t run from the room at what she says next.

  “Will you do check-in if I promise to leave you alone after?”

  I groan, as long and as loud as I can. “I hate check-in.”

  “Don’t say you hate it. We have to focus on the positive, not the negative.” She tugs at the hair just above my left ear that never lays flat.

  “Fine. I don’t hate it. But I seriously dislike it.”

  “Well, okay then.” Pause. “But will you do it for me just this once on your very first day of middle school? Give me one adjective for the four categories. You don’t have to explain. I just want four words, for your poor mother.”

  “Not cool. That’s emotional blackmail. Therapists aren’t allowed to do that.”

  “Fair play for moms, though.”

  She waits. She knows I’ll do it. We’ve been doing check-ins since forever. When I was younger, I’d have nightmares and panic attacks every time I got sick and would have to go to the doctor. Which was all the time. I’d get ear infections and strep throat and rashes and cavities and every single fever and sometimes I’d have to ride in the ambulance. Mom says it’s because I was born so early. Small size, smaller immune system, I guess. The check-in is to calm me down, make me feel “aware and in control of my emotions,” as she likes to say. Try explaining that to your first-grade teacher when she asks you to join the rest of the class on the rug for circle time and you tell her you are not “emotionally ready for social interaction before nine a.m.”

  “Fine. One.” I hold up a finger. “Mentally, I’m… fizzy.” She opens her mouth. “No, you don’t get to ask any more about it. Two.” I hold up another finger. “Physically, I’m tired, duh. Three, emotionally—” I stop and think about it. New town. New school. New troll named Chance. No friends (cousins don’t count). No Dad meeting me at the bus stop when I got home, like he promised. A mom who clearly didn’t shower today and is now covered in cornmeal. “I’m… angry, I guess.” I wait for her to say something about how I need to talk this out, but she doesn’t. Two points for Mom.

  “Spiritually?” she prompts, steering us along to the last of the four check-ins.

  “Spiritually, I’m, um… I can’t think of anything for that one. I am spiritually neutral right now. You think Sister Mary Margaret would make me stay late after Mass?”

  She chuckles like I knew she would. Sister Mary Margaret is the nicest and oldest nun at our church back home. She smells like cinnamon and would forget my name five minutes after we said hello on the church steps. I kind of miss her.

  “Well,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair, “I guess that’s pretty standard for a first day.” She holds out a plate covered in shriveled bits of okra heaped on greasy paper towels. The shifting sun turns the plate red—a warning from the universe: DO NOT EAT! I take one anyway, because I am a good son. They’re somehow burned and slimy at the same time.

  “I really need to get back to work,” she says with a sigh, sticking her finger into a piece of okra and squishing it like Play-Doh.

  “You said it, not me.”

  I am half-kidding, but she doesn’t laugh. She just stares at the plate with a blank look on her face. I shouldn’t have said that. Mom loved her job. She loved helping people figure themselves out, and now she’s here, wearing rabbit slippers and smushing okra. I want to apologize, but the words won’t come. Sorry is much harder to say than to think.

  * * *

  We decide to eat out for dinner at the China Palace, which is so bad, it actually makes me wish for okra.

  I bite into a nuggety chunk of sweet and sour chicken. Goo the color of Orange Crush squirts onto my plate. I draw scribbles in it with my chopsticks so I don’t have to look at Mom who is looking at Dad who is looking at me over his glasses. I can feel them trading worried glances over their fried rice.

  They want to know more about school. But what good would it do to give them the real picture? It’s not like Dad’s going to say, “Wow, son! I had no idea how hard it would be on you!” and whisk us back to Denver. His nose and cheeks are red from being outside all day at his new job. Must be nice. I disembowel an egg roll. We had better restaurants back home.

  “It’s only two and a half hours away,” Dad had said when we drove off in a U-Haul full of all our worldly possessions. As if distance makes the difference when you’re swapping out your whole life for another one. I miss my blue room and the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck to the ceiling and the fact that I could walk to school so there was no need to deal with the bus, which Dad never apologized for not meeting me at this afternoon. I swing my legs in the booth. My feet don’t touch the floor.

  I was six the last time I was the new kid. Dad had signed me up for T-ball. I was so excited on my first day. I kept punching my new glove like they do in movies. The coach was mostly belly. Like, that’s all you could ever look at—his big round stomach. I expected it to jiggle like Santa, but when I accidentally bumped into him it was hard as a rock. He looked at me like he didn’t know what to do with me, like I was a dog that had wandered onto the field.

  When it was time to start batting practice, Coach passed me a helmet. I hugged it to me carefully, like a bowl full of goldfish. But when I put it on, it slipped backward, right off my head and into the dirt. He checked the size and handed me another. Same thing. Again and again until the dugout was covered in upturned helmets like empty turtle shells. All the other kids were shoving one another and picking gum off the underside of the bench. They were ready to play.

  Coach looked at me and the helmets and then walked ten paces onto the field, his stomach leading the way. He signaled to Dad, who was sitting with the other parents under the trees along the fence line. They had a conference midfield. I kept my eyes on them so I wouldn’t have to look at my teammates. The coach’s son, who played in an older league, started stacking up the helmets. He moved around me like I was a rock in the river.

  The next week, before practice, Dad handed me my very own helmet. It looked exactly like all the others I had tried on. We were sitting in our old tan Jeep, but it was new then.

  “Go on. Test it out, kiddo,” Dad said, pushing his glasses up his nose, a nervous habit. I stuck it on my head like a total trusting dope. It fit like a dream. I took it off again to study it. It was magic. That’s when I saw a long white strip of padding along the back.

  “What’s this?”

  “Some extra support to make sure the helmet doesn’t slip,” Dad said, putting the helmet back on my head where it sat perfectly. It sounded totally reasonable to my six-year-old self. I wanted to play T-ball, and now I could. I ran onto the field without another thought—like a deer straight into the road.

  The coach’s son got to me first. “Peewee hat for the little guy, huh?” he said, and knocked his knuckles on my helmet. Then he pulled it off. When I made a grab for it, he held it above his head, and the little bit
of white padding slipped out on the dirt between us. He burst into a high-pitched hyena laugh that went on forever. I can still hear it. The Pampers label stood out greener than the grass in the outfield. My dad had sent me to baseball practice with a diaper inside my helmet. I never played again.

  I picture Chance in the locker room, rubbing my head “for luck,” and my stomach rolls over on itself. What if this entire year is one long, miserable game of T-ball? I’m in the exact same humiliating situation and once again, it’s all Dad’s fault.

  The waitress brings over our check and a plate of fortune cookies.

  “You want to pick first?” Mom pushes the cookies toward me. She has long, graceful hands to fit her long, graceful self. Tonight, though, she looks tired. Ditto, Mom. Ditto.

  I take a folded cookie.

  They say you have to choose your own fortune or it won’t come true, like blowing out the candles on your birthday cake after making a wish. Dad picks the next one, and then Mom. We crack them open at the same time. My cookie’s kind of bendy. Probably stale.

  Dad nudges Mom. “You go first, Marion.”

  She flips over her slip of paper and then she snorts and reads, “A closed mouth gathers no feet.”

  “You’re making that up.” Dad grabs at it, but she holds it out of reach.

  “I’m not!”

  “What does that even mean?” I ask. I picture a colossal mouth sprouting hundreds of little feet along its upper lip, like a mustache.

  “It means,” she says, between bites of her cookie, “watch what you say so you don’t stick your foot in your mouth.”

  Dad smirks and says, “Perfect for a therapist.”

  “Or any human,” she shoots back.

  I still don’t get it.

  Dad pulls the fortune from his cookie next. He laughs and thumps the table with his fist.

  “The man on top of the mountain did not fall there.”

  He pops the entire cookie in his mouth. The crunching seems louder than humanly possible. “I like it,” he says with his mouth full. “You have to work for what you want. Seize the day!” He’s been spouting stuff like this since we moved. He’s become an inspirational poster covered in kittens shouting, “Believe in yourself!”